The differences between social reality and legal reality. (250 words)

Members of the opposite culture felt a need to point out to us how these actions ______ have the opposite effect of what we intended and desired.

In cities with rent control, the city government sets the maximum rent that a landlord can charge for an apartment. Supporters of rent control argue that it protects people who are living in apartments. Their rent cannot increase; therefore, they are not in danger of losing their homes. However, the critics say that after a long time, rent control may have negative effects. Landlords know that they cannot increase their profits. Therefore, they invest in other businesses where they can increase their profits. They do not invest in new buildings which would also be rent-controlled. As a result, new apartments are not built. Many people who need apartments cannot find any. According to the critics, the end result of rent control is a shortage of apartments in the city.Some theorists argue that the minimum wage law can cause problems in the same way. The federal government sets the minimum that an employer must pay workers. The minimum helps people who generally look for unskilled, low-paying jobs. However, if the minimum is high, employers may hire fewer workers. They will replace workers with machinery. The price, which is the wage that employers must pay, increases. Therefore, other things being equal, the number of workers that employers want decreases. Thus, critics claim, an increase in the minimum wage may cause unemployment. Some poor people may find themselves without jobs instead of with jobs at the minimum wage.Supporters of the minimum wage say that it helps people keep their dignity. Because of the law, workers cannot sell their services for less than the minimum. Furthermore, employers cannot force workers to accept jobs at unfair wages.Economic theory predicts the results of economic decisions such as decisions about farm production, rent control, and the minimum wage. The predictions may be correct only if “other things are equal”.Economists do not agree on some of the predictions. They also do not agree on the value of different decisions. Some economists support a particular decision while others criticize it. Economists do agree, however, that there are no simple answers to economic questions.1. There is the possibility that setting maximum rent may ______.

2. According to the critics, rent control ______.

3. The problem of unemployment will arise, ______.

4. The passage tells us ______.

5. Which of the following statements is NOT true?

Early men were also greatly interested in the stars they saw twinkling in the sky at night. What they did not realize was that the stars were also present during the daytime, but their light was not visible because of the brilliance of the sun. How did they discover this?There is one event which does enable us to see the stars in the daytime. It is the total eclipse of the sun(日全食),when the moon passes in front of the sun and hides it from view. When this happens, the sky becomes dark enough for the stars to be seen. Total eclipses of this kind do not occur very often and are not likely to be seen from the same area more than once every fifty-four years. One can imagine what an awe-inspiring sight it must have been for an early man, who would remember the event for the rest of his life.So man watched the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars and wondered about them. It was practicing the oldest branch of science—astronomy.

A job description should give details of the performance ______ a specific job.

The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photograph’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting.Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves—anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.Photographers’ disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography’s prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the1960’s. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting—that is, abstract art as developed indifferent ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse—presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity—in short, an art.47. What is the author mainly concerned with? The author is concerned with ______.48. Which of the following adjectives best describes “the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism” as the author represents it in paragraph 2?49. Why does the author introduce Abstract Expressionist painter?50. How did the nineteenth-century defenders of photography stress the photography?